Quoted By:
(...Yes. But that doesn't mean you aren't in control.
There is more of you than there is of it now. All you want to do is talk to Us.)
To corrode the artifice away. To impose reality on this frivolous delusion. To prevent the escape of inescapable death. Yes; this is a worthy goal. You must open your mouth for it.
...
Do not resist! You are resisting. If you do not open your mouth it will come out of your eyes. There! Good! You are a good girl. You are a smart and capable young lady, Charlotte Fawkins, exactly as your father always said about you, and your lips are flapped to their greatest extent, and the steam billowing from your throat is body-warm and velvet-scarlet and may as well be a smoke signal for the attention it draws. Yes, everybody who forgot you has remembered, and has turned their unshining eyes upon you.
Which is fine! Positive thinking. You'll run out of red stuff and they'll go along and forget again. They're not really people. Maybe they were people, but now they're Us playing finger-puppets, and Us likes you, right? Because you're so charming and heroic and ultimately good-intentioned? Claudia was grounded for four months but she's off the hook now, which is representative of how Us feels? You're off the hook? The crowd is restless, but there wasn't much red stuff to begin with, and the flood of steam is slowing. Your lips hang with red dew. Your throat is thinly slicked with red residue. It looks as though you've lit off two or three novelty smoke balls, a pack of which may or may not be in your pocket. Maybe you can say that if anybody asks. That you lit off smoke balls. Or, better yet, you can shut your eyes and huff out the very last of the red stuff, harmlessly sublimated, in a great plume like a great big lizard-thing. And you can hope that when you open your eyes that there will be nobody left to look.
>[-1 SV: 0/???]
>[SUNSTRUCK: REVEALED! Gain 1 SV any time you fall to 0 SV. Lose 2 ID any time you gain SV in this manner.]
You can hope. You can hope. You can hope. You wait an extra long time before you open your eyes, to add extra hoping. Is that why it happened? Because you waited too long? No, no, no. It was because of *Ellery*.
Yeah. That's right. Stupid ugly smug Real Ellery and his stupid meaningless brain sun, which he tried hiding from you like it was some big secret. It wasn't even some big secret, was the thing. He was just embarrassed about it, because you'd already found out every single one of his other actual secrets, and you'd got into his head even though he tried to lock you up, and because he's a useless impotent idiot child-man. And he— Ellery— him getting all dumb and mad for zero reason *made* you go and eat his sun. He *made* you eat it just to spite him. Would you have done it if he wasn't so stupid? Absolutely not. Your baser instincts would've been overridden. You certainly would've paid much more attention to what was driving you to eat that damn sun.
(2/5?)
